If the name Harish Abbott sounds familiar, it should. He’s the co-founder who built and sold Deliverr to Shopify for a cool $2.1 billion back in 2022. Now, he’s back with another big bet: that logistics — one of the messiest, most complex industries on the planet — can finally be tamed with AI.
His new startup, Augment, is all about an AI assistant called Augie. Think of Augie as the logistics worker who never complains about emails, texts, or endless invoice chases. Instead, it quietly handles the boring (but necessary) stuff like gathering bids from trucking companies, building optimized loads, tracking shipments, and even chasing down paperwork so billing doesn’t get stuck in limbo. Basically, Augie is the colleague everyone wishes they had.
And investors? They’re eating it up. Just five months after coming out of stealth with a $25M seed round, Augment has already locked down a massive $85M Series A led by Redpoint, with 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and others piling in. That’s a serious vote of confidence for a startup that’s barely a year old.
Abbott’s pitch is simple: logistics is drowning in manual work — phone calls, spreadsheets, endless email chains. Augie can cut through all that noise across Slack, SMS, Telegram, email, and even voice. The early results speak volumes: clients like Armstrong Transport Group are already reporting things like a 40% reduction in invoice delays.
Of course, Abbott isn’t the only one chasing this vision. Competitors like Vooma, FleetWorks, and even shipping giants like FedEx and UPS are experimenting with AI assistants. But Abbott believes Augment has momentum on its side. Customer adoption is growing fast, feedback is glowing, and the next step is hiring 50 more engineers to tackle logistics’ notoriously fragmented systems.
The long game? Expanding beyond trucking into international shipping and broader supply chains. If Augie can pull that off, we might just be looking at the AI-powered backbone of the global logistics industry.
For now, one thing’s clear: in a world where humans hate paperwork and love efficiency, Augie might just be the MVP of freight.
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